“So I gave in … I told him what he wanted to know …”
— Louise Erdrich, “Tracks”
Serious fiction — not necessarily complicated or especially intellectual, merely serious in its intent — is a quaint thing in 21st century America. Sort of like needlepoint.
The keyhole that authors once provided for enlightening peeks into the lives of others — from Conrad’s great men to Cheever’s next door neighbors — is long supplanted by the decidedly un-serious intent of television.
But while TV can shine a light into the boudoirs of schizophrenics, cuckolded statesmen and poor little rich girls, it has yet found a way to pierce the human soul. For that we need writers like Louise Erdrich.
Erdrich, a 1979 graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, appears this evening at Goucher College in support of a new novel, “The Plague of Doves,” released by HarperCollins.
She will likely tell us not just what we want to know — “I am just a storyteller,” she has said, “and I take them where I find them …” — but what we should and need to know, particularly about the people in North America before it was called North America.
“Louise has been one of our important writers from the moment “Love Medicine,” hit the scene,” said the poet Elizabeth Spires, a Goucher professor who brought Erdrich to campus through the Kratz Center for Creative Writing.
“Love Medicine,” Erdrich’s debut novel, was released in 1984. It moves forward and back in time, launching what the author has called a life’s work of one long novel split into many books and concerns a handful of families in and around the Anishaabe reservation in North Dakota.
Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Anishaabe nation, better known as Ojibway or Chippewa. Her work concentrates on the breadth of Native American culture in the way that Faulkner put the American South on the examining table.
And she spent a long-ago summer writing poetry while working at Kentucky Fried Chicken, always good training for someone who wants to observe the American psyche if not the palate.
“She has a large readership, especially among book clubs,” said Spires, a classmate of Erdrich’s at Hopkins. “One of the nicer things about Louise’s work is its lyrical quality. The prose is poetic in a way you don’t find in a lot of fiction writers.”
IF YOU GO
Louise Erdrich
Venue: Kraushaar Auditorium, Goucher College, 1021 Dulaney Valley Road. Towson.
When: 8 tonight
Tickets: Free but must be reserved in advance by calling 410-337-6333 or e-mailing [email protected].
